The Mill for Grinding Old People Young

by Glenn Patterson

  Something resembling a hysteria, I can only think, was incubating in me that early summer of 1831. (I have in the past deceived, and flattered, myself it was a contagion, every bit as virulent as the cholera: a few weeks before, Hector Berlioz had travelled hundreds of miles through the Italian states with a maid’s costume in a parcel, intent on taking the lives of his fiancée, her mother, and the man who, with the mother’s encouragement, his fiancée now proposed to marry.) I am trying to get as close as I can to its origin, or origins. At times, however, I have the impression that I am dealing not with an earlier version of myself but another person entirely.

  My intention – my daydream – to begin with, though – of this I am certain – was not to harm, but to humble. If I had an image at all in my head that morning it was of Lord Belfast wading out into the waters of the Lagan, looking back over his shoulder at me, standing on the bank, gesturing grandly: “Swim.”

  “You are cheerier today,” Ferris said, this at about half past ten. “You have scarcely let up whistling since you walked in the door.”

  Bright was asleep on the shelf in the chartroom. (Sir Clueless was out for the morning; I had a clear conscience on that score.) He had booked for himself an extra session in the gymnasium later in hopes of sweating off some of the previous night’s excess.

  “He was so drunk he raced Tantra Barbus across the river,” Ferris said. “Over and back.”

  “Bright did?”

  “Oh, he didn’t swim against him, he rowed. If you had seen Tantra when he dragged himself from the water . . .” Ferris danced in the circle I had seen described beneath the lamp post on Ann Street.

  I do not know that I whistled again the whole of that day, but it made no difference, finally. The seed was already planted. Not for Tantra alone, but for all of us, held by him in such contempt, Lord Belfast would have to be taught a lesson.

  *

  I persuaded myself that I had need of a pistol. How else might I convince Lord Belfast to get into the water? How I might, even with it, was not a question I stopped to ask. I was, in that sense, following the lead of the men who had beat a path to the town’s gunsmiths in the aftermath of the murders at Toohavara. Not that I could simply stroll into Messrs Braddell or Neill and pore over their wares, both of those men having known me since I was able to walk, and known my grandfather’s principles no doubt a good deal longer. For notwithstanding that it was enshrined in the constitution that as a Protestant subject he had the right to possess arms for his own defence (as a Catholic subject he would have risked being transported), my grandfather would no more have a gun about the house than he would a bottle of gin.

  Nor could I without inviting question enquire of a friend for the loan of something suitable. I did briefly consider asking Ferris, for the added cloak of legitimacy it would bestow, if I might join his duck-hunting fraternity, but, by his own account, the fowling piece was the preferred weapon on those afternoons spent in the barrel out on Belfast Lough; I wanted nothing so obvious. For a few days I kept a close watch on the comings and goings around the Ballast Office’s gun cabinet, before concluding that there were indeed only two keys, one on Sir Clueless’s key ring, the other on the constable, Gelston’s. I had as much chance of removing their trousers without their noticing as removing those keys. Which did not stop me, when no one else was about, giving the cabinet doors a tug in passing. Locked fast every time.

  And then I remembered the Lamb and Flag and the “fixer” Bright had pointed out to Ferris and me on Easter Monday, and whom I had seen again at work the first night I walked back from the Mill for Grinding Old People Young. “A man who would buy from you what never was yours to begin with and sell you what by honest means you never could have got.” Was that not how Bright had described him? That was exactly the sort of man I needed now.

  I think he must have come into the world attached to that tavern by means of an invisible cord, for he was once more at the table in the corner where I had first espied him, when I returned there on the evening of the day that his face had suddenly loomed up again in my mind. Either that or the tavern had taken shape around him. He was as focal a point as the fire, and to be treated with the same respect and caution.

  I found a spot almost in the centre of the room from which to observe him, hiding, as it were in plain view, becoming a part of whatever group temporarily coalesced around me. Men came and sat down beside him and a few minutes later got up and walked away; words were spoken out of the corners of mouths, curt nods exchanged, coins passed from palm to palm. His eyes never rested, but darted to the door, the counter, the table to the right, the table to the left, the door again, the counter . . . They lit on me as they had lit on me on Easter Monday, as they lit at regular intervals on every person and object in that room. (“What do you want of me?” they seemed to ask of the one, and of the other, “How might I turn you to profit?”) I decided that there was nothing to be gained on this occasion by glancing away. Without any suspicious movement on my part his eyes would soon enough continue on their circuit.

  After the fourth frank meeting of his gaze I saw an opportunity as one man got up from the seat next to his and was not instantly replaced by another, although someone else hiding in plain view would tell you the replacement was me.

  Once I was beside him I was no longer a fit object of scrutiny. The only question now was “buy” or “sell”; already he was looking to see who would be next in my seat. For a moment I was granted a view of the world as he saw it, not as a marketplace alone, but also as a laboratory: he was a scientist and we were his subjects, the proof of his hypotheses as much a motivation as the profit deriving from them.

  There was a smell of preserved lemons, overlaid on lard, which I attributed to the pomade that shaped the waves in his hair, or, as it seemed close to, kept them in check. Everything about him suggested a capacity to burst out suddenly.

  He had a glass before him that I had not seen him lift more than twice in all the time I had been watching, and on one of those occasions he had set it down again without taking a drink. He was probably the soberest person in the whole house, apart from me.

  “I have been told you might help me with something,” I said.

  “It depends on what the something is.” The voice from such a hulk of a man was surprisingly reassuring, the words themselves scarcely less so: this was how I imagined a conversation of that nature would go. Still I could not bring myself to say the “something” outright, even in that hubbub and in the presence of so many diplomatically deaf years. I was obliged instead to fall back on hints and gestures, to which he nodded slowly. He stole but a single glance at my hands, as I specified “nothing too big”.

  There was scarcely any hesitation. “I will need a down payment,” he said, and when I asked how much, laid his index finger on his coat sleeve: one would do it. I did not think he meant a shilling. I had succeeded in my year and a half at the Ballast Office in putting aside six pounds. I was already reconciled to having to part with a sizeable portion of it to get what I needed. I slipped a sovereign from my purse and passed it into his palm as I had seen the others do.

  “All right,” he said, although it might have been addressed to anyone, for the back of his head only was presented to me now. “Tomorrow night. Eight, not a minute after.”

  I could not settle to my work the next day any more than I could will the hours or even the minutes to pass. Several times I got up from my desk and put my ear to the clock on the back wall to check that it had not stopped altogether, until Ferris threatened to tie me to my seat if I did not leave off from it: the constant reminders were making the day go ten times slower for him. I was rescued at last from my torment late in the morning by a folder of documents, which Sir Clueless wanted taken to the Stamp Office on Arthur Street. He was as pleased to see me be first to my feet as the other clerks were envious. “I should have tied you down when I had the chance,” said Ferris, as I passed him on my way out of the door.

 
The errand quickly accomplished, I took the opportunity to slip back to the house to satisfy myself that everything was in readiness for the conclusion of the evening’s business, not least the hiding place, which after much deliberation I had decided ought to be behind the chest of drawers where the pennies had been hidden all those years before and where still, in all the years since, no human hand but my own had ventured.

  It was a Thursday. I had spotted Molly as I left the office, making her way towards Tomb Street and the butter market, where she sometimes met and swapped news with her sister, who kept house for a minister off in Dundonald. My grandfather, I knew, would be out too – Thursday had for twenty years been his day for prison visits – and Nisbet with him. I had let myself in at the front door and was just stepping on to the stairs when I thought I heard a retching. I stopped, one foot suspended in mid-air, listening. There it was again, quite distinctly, from the far end of the hallway. I eased myself backwards off the stair and walked on tiptoe towards the door through to the kitchen. I called “hello”, but got no response, save for the scrape of metal being dragged over the stone flags. I hesitated a moment longer then grasped the handle and flung the door wide . . . Hannah was busy about the fire. She looked back over her shoulder at me. Her face was flushed. Hanks of hair clung to her cheeks and forehead.

  “Is everything all right?” I asked.

  “Everything is fine,” she said, but so weakly that my suspicions multiplied a hundredfold. I took a step into the room.

  “Only I would have sworn I heard a noise just now like vomiting.”

  She cast her eyes here and there about the kitchen, frowning, as though someone might have crept in without her knowing.

  A tin basin sat to one side of the hearth, a linen cloth covering it. I breathed in deeply through my nose. Hannah at the same moment opened the door of the oven, set into the wall above the fire, and a smell of fresh-baked bread overpowered the room.

  I let the breath out again in a frustrated sigh. “You know if you are sick at all you are to go to your room and not leave it until a doctor has seen you?” In fact, if she had been concealing an infection of some kind we would have been within our rights to send her back to wherever she had come from and have the doctor see her there.

  I had an image of a marker being pinned to a “cholera map” in the Ballast Office of some other port: “Outbreak confirmed in Belfast.”

  “I am quite well, thank you,” she said, and set two loaves on a board on the table, next to a pot with a rabbit in it; the crusts were a deep chestnut, verging on black at the crest. “Just hot from working.”

  I looked again at the basin by the fire. I had to see in it.

  “Don’t!” she cried, so loudly that I jumped rather than halted, hardly aware that I had begun to translate thought into action. “I have another ball of dough in there,” she said. “If the air gets in before it has finished rising it will spoil.”

  She held my gaze. We were probably – it had not struck me before – of a similar, if not an exact, age. Would she have dared to speak to my grandfather like that, or even to Nisbet? But then would I have considered for one moment checking in the basin if it had been Molly giving me the assurance?

  “Of course,” I said at length and turned away from the fire. I watched her face for signs of undue relief, and saw none. “I am sorry if I interrupted you.”

  She was occupied with a large kettle when I let myself out, using a poker wrapped in a cloth to push it closer to the coals; I paused in the hallway several moments more to ensure there was no repetition of the retching, then carried on up to my room.

  The Lamb and Flag was, if possible, even busier that night than the one before. I arrived half an hour before the time appointed, which was as well, for it took ten minutes of jostling to get in at the door: my grandfather’s prison-visit day was to the rest of the town “pay day”. Or as Ferris once so succinctly described it, the start of the weekly race to drink your wages before you frittered them away on something altogether less fun. A race, he was proud to say, for which he was as fit as any man in Belfast, and no gymnasium required.

  I was as many minutes again getting myself into a position to see, and be seen from, the table in the corner. As before, the buyers and sellers came and went, although in keeping with Ferris’s formula the turnover this evening seemed twice as rapid; as before I waited until I judged that an opening had been made for me; as before the fixer did not turn to look at me once I had sat in the seat beside him.

  “The man at the end of the bar,” was all that he said.

  I looked up. There were three men at the end of the bar nearest to us, none of whom was taking the slightest notice of me. A heartbeat later, however, the middle and, of course, least likely-looking one tossed off his drink and left by a side door. Not being directed what else to do, I stood up to follow. The fixer extended his arm as casually as if he were stretching into a yawn, barring my way. I pressed a sovereign into his hand and when his arm did not move had no option but to press another. The barrier was raised, the yawn, which appeared now entirely genuine, completed.

  The door opened on to a dim and narrow yard with barrels, stacked three high, along one side and a choked drain along the other, slicking the cobbles with what I preferred not to think. The dominant smell of stale ale and cabbage was, in the circumstances, the best that could have been hoped for. I could see no one; could scarcely make out the far wall. I sensed, though, that it would not do to call out, and my mouth all at once was too dry to whistle. I tapped on the barrel nearest to me: once, twice, three times. A few moments later there came three answering taps from the shadowy end of the yard. I realised as I stepped with care towards it that there was a gap between the last of the barrel-stacks and the wall that finally took on definition beyond. The man I had followed was wedged in here. I stopped before him. He looked at me as though I was the one bringing something to him.

  “I have already paid,” I said. “In there.”

  “In there” was in fact as notional as where I was standing now had been a few moments ago, the shadows having somehow given me the slip and regrouped behind me.

  His lips moved, but nothing came out.

  “Do you have it or do you not?” I asked, trying to keep my patience, and only then thought to look to see where his hands were all this time, which was down below his waist.

  “In the name of G—!” I cried, and staggered backwards, one foot plunging into the drain. I dragged it free and fled, scattering the shadows, into the bar. Shock made me lose all caution. I leaned across the fixer’s table, with no regard for the person who had taken my place at his side.

  “What kind of a man did you take me for?”

  His eyebrows rose as he looked past me into the room, where every last customer was making a point of having seen nothing untoward; his voice, though, remained pitched low. “One who understood that there was less harm in that than in anything else that you might have been asking me for.”

  The man from the alley had come back in and taken up his position between his silent companions at the end of the counter, where a fresh drink had been set up for him. You would not have guessed from his expression as he supped, or from theirs, that he had stepped outside at all.

  “You have three pounds of mine,” I said. That got me for the first time the fixer’s full attention, and his finger, springing up like a lock of hair, in my face. “You have three seconds to get out of this house,” he said. “And as for anything else you might require I would suggest you ask among your own class, for that is where the majority of such articles are to be found.”

  The finger between my eyes was joined by a second. “Two,” he said, and I was gone.

  My nostrils were still filled with the smell of cabbage a week and two visits to the Peter’s Hill baths later.

  On the evening of the second of those visits I was brooding in my room when there was a knock at the door. I called “Come in”, expecting Nisbet, sent by my grandfather t
o ask what ailed me (I did not see how anyone else could have missed the stench I was giving off), and got instead Hannah. I noticed she closed the door behind her before curtsying.

  “I needed to talk about yon time in the kitchen,” she said.

  It says much about what had been preoccupying me in the minutes before she knocked that I thought at first she meant on the night that Maria had come to see me. I feared – may God forgive me – an attempt to extort from me something more than the two sixpences with which I had rewarded her silence.

  “I explained to you, the lady left,” I began, getting to my feet, but Hannah shook her head.

  “The other day, I mean, the boaking you heard” – she used the word as though it were the only fit one, which in that instant it became – “that was me.”

  “The basin by the hearth?” I said.

  “No, no, that really was bread. I boaked in a bucket out the back door.”

  “I am glad to hear that you did not lie.” I was inching towards the window: the air, I must have been thinking, remembering the cholera circulars; flush away the bad with the good. “But, with respect, the ‘where’ hardly matters: you are sick and risk infecting the entire household.”

  As I said this I was conscious that she did not actually look unwell. She looked, in fact, haler than I was used to seeing her.

  “I am going to have a baby,” she said simply.

  “Oh.” I stopped in the middle of the floor. I had not much experience of these situations, but I had enough to know that congratulations were not always in order. “When?”

  “I cannot tell for sure. All Saints maybe. I feared I was before even I came to work here, but I feared more not getting the place, so I never let on to anybody.”

  She had not come further than that first step into the room. I asked her if she would like to sit down, which, after a moment’s hesitation, she did, awkwardly, on the lip of the easy chair.